At the time it was clear to us that NS1 was under steep decline around the time WOW was released. We tried our best to turn it around with 3.x releases, but at best we managed to hold steady against the trend. That in itself is a worthy achievement.
Lots of people talking poo here about things they know nothing about. There was never a single change made to NS movement or combat abilities to support NS:Combat game mode. Combat was designed as something to fill servers and introduce people to game mechanics in a much simpler environment. I personally think it was wasted effort, but others more knowledgeable than me disagree.
We came very close to releasing on Steam - up to the point of actually having a Test App ID Installing and running from Steam, but unfortunately it was not to happen due to factors outside of our control.
There comes a point when you have to accept that, in the end, all good things fade away.
Thanks for clarifying, puzl. Hopefully that will end it.
Considering that NS1 was a free mod for a game released in the 90s, that remained popular for almost 10 years and left a permanent impression on everyone who played it for any significant period of time, you (the devs) have every reason to be proud of your work. Unless alzheimers gets me, I'm going to remember that game until the day I die.
I played NS 1 from almost the release and when Steam took it over it was awful. And I remember for months it was a bug fest and it was very painful to get the game to run without errors. This didn't help things.
Combat did impact classic, there is no question about that. WoW was also a factor. Lots of our clan members started playing WoW and it showed in decreasing numbers on servers.
fanaticThis post has been edited.Join Date: 2003-07-23Member: 18377Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
Unfortunately, when asked to analyze cause and effect, most people have a hard time differentiating between correlation and causation. This is made abundantly clear by the vast majority of "ns1 declined because of <x>" hypotheses.
I can only attest to my reasons for leaving NS1. For me it was combat even if it was only due to observation. I observed full combat servers and empty classic servers. It was hard to find a good classic game or get people to join classic. Looking back perhaps it was because the most of the classic players left? I don't know. I think it was the 3.2 or 3.4 patch (I don't remember) that made some balance changes that really changed the game IMO. Again my memory fails, but I think it had to do with some wicked fades being OP.
I think Combat just came at the time of classic decline and that makes it easy to try and say it was combats fault. I think it was a combination of things patch changes, steam issues, the fact that it wasn't being ported to Source, combat pulling a few classic players away but making it look like it was pulling a lot classic players away (again observation and how it made me feel).
Though I don't recall Steam being an issue for me so perhaps I left before then. With WoW launching and not being able to find good classic matches I left for the time/life sinkhole that is WoW.
Thankfully NS2 launched at the perfect time with the decline of WoW and great classic style games I am back and happy!
maybe @|DFA|Havoc can remind me of the balance change that ruined the game for us
I can only attest to my reasons for leaving NS1. For me it was combat even if it was only due to observation. I observed full combat servers and empty classic servers. It was hard to find a good classic game or get people to join classic. Looking back perhaps it was because the most of the classic players left? I don't know. I think it was the 3.2 or 3.4 patch (I don't remember) that made some balance changes that really changed the game IMO. Again my memory fails, but I think it had to do with some wicked fades being OP.
I think Combat just came at the time of classic decline and that makes it easy to try and say it was combats fault. I think it was a combination of things patch changes, steam issues, the fact that it wasn't being ported to Source, combat pulling a few classic players away but making it look like it was pulling a lot classic players away (again observation and how it made me feel).
Though I don't recall Steam being an issue for me so perhaps I left before then. With WoW launching and not being able to find good classic matches I left for the time/life sinkhole that is WoW.
Thankfully NS2 launched at the perfect time with the decline of WoW and great classic style games I am back and happy!
maybe @|DFA|Havoc can remind me of the balance change that ruined the game for us
Let's not forget all the siege map servers. Personally, I found them more fun than combat, but they were detrimental to Classic games as well.
Its important to note that world of warcraft was released late 2004 and is the cause of many gaming communities to fall. Almost every game community had a huge drop in player numbers during that time. NS1 was no exception.
The Icelandic NS1 community was at its peak just before wow was released. We had over 150 active players and 3 servers full every day, it was constantly growing. After wow was released it was impossible to get it active again. To many players went to wow and to other games afterwards.
Interesting graph, good job. I would suggest you increase the granularity of the version numbers though, the ones you have now are very misleading. The period between what you have designated as 2.0 and 3.0 was actually mostly different beta versions of 3.0. 2.0x was only played between august 03 and january 04.
This is also why your stats start in january 2004: 3.0b1 was the first steam release of ns1, so that's when steam started collecting stats for ns1 player counts. Even though your graph contains no stats from 1.0x or 2.0x, it appears as though it contains stats from 2.0x.
For accuracy, I suggest the following granularity and nomenclature: 1.0x, 2.0x, 3.0x (start january 2004), 3.1x (start august 2005), 3.2. The x represents that the most significant part of the period was played using one or more updated versions or betas of that version, for example 1.04, 2.01, 3.0b1,b2,b3,b4,b5,b6,f, et cetera.
Edit: There is also something wrong with the end of the graph. Something must've happened to break stats collection in september 09, because the player count did not drop rapidly like that, it was a steady decline (compare the period march 09-sep09) until today (there are still people playing the game today).
Ah good point. I can certainly see how this can be misleading. I'll fix the release dates so it doesn't give the wrong impression. Also, was there a centralized location that recorded the release dates of each 3.0 beta version? I'd like to avoid scrolling through wayback machine caches of natural-selection.org to figure out the specific dates of each release.
Unfortunately, it looks like steam stats switched over to their current format around that time and didn't include NS1 in their playercount tracking. I'll see if I can find an alternate source (game monitor or game tracker) with cached playercount values to fill in the blanks.
Website outtage was Aug 2k5 to Sept 2k6 IIRC? I may be waaay off on this tho... god its been forever.
WOW Release was late 2k4, which is shortly before the graph really drops.
It is worth noting that it's amazing NS did as well as it did through all the changes/releases around then, which killed off many other games/mods. It is truly a testiment to how good the gameplay was.
NarfwakJoin Date: 2002-11-02Member: 5258Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica PT Lead, NS2 Community Developer
edited April 2013
It's worth noting that 2004-2006 is when WoW was pulling people out of every other game community. The Half-Life scene in general, not just NS, was suffering in those days.
Not to mention that HL2 came out around the same time and all the talk was about which mods were going to work on porting over to Source (discussed: all of them; implemented: almost none of them).
Combat saved ns1. It killed classic though. As an admin of a set of 187combat servers we had permanently full combat, half full seige and empty classic for many years.
After steam mods could be a real shite to install, that put people off. Wow took players from all games - i bet CS took a hit too.
Combat haters always blamed combat for killing ns when it clearly didnt. Craply run classic servers with crap admins killed classic. Combat games (and aeige to aome extent) were playable to most people. Classic could be dominated by a single fade with blink/meta/swipe skills.
Problem in ns1 is the same as ns2. All balanxing is for nought if newbies join a classic game, getsteamrollered due to lack of team balance or crap admins. They then join a combat where they can play and enjoy.
What hurted NS1 a lot was the fact that the site went down ! For years.
There was no central community anymore at this time, only a few clan based.
Lacking of exchange and new blood can only lead to extinction.
Anyone know the (rough) dates when this occurred? I'd like to overlay those dates on the graph, but the only details I can find is from Kouji's UWE History video (forums were down sometime in 2004-2005).
The whole "combat killed NS1" thing is getting pretty old. Yes, there were people who only played combat instead of classic. If combat wasn't in the game those people wouldn't have played classic, they just would have played a different game. If anything, combat brought a different audience to the game and prolonged its lifespan.
I think the main causes for the decline were
- Steam sucking in the early days
- The website going down for a long period of time
- World of Warcraft (so many game communities crushed in the wake of this behemoth)
- Natural decline in interest over time
I do enjoy NS1 a whole lot though, wish people still played it. I can get on a 32-man WongaNS server that fills up every day, but other than that and the occasional passworded gather server the game is dead. Maybe this forum could organize some NS1 gathers? I could see there being interest in that.
The whole "combat killed NS1" thing is getting pretty old. Yes, there were people who only played combat instead of classic. If combat wasn't in the game those people wouldn't have played classic, they just would have played a different game. If anything, combat brought a different audience to the game
I question that. If you have a mod, that only caters to a small audience of people who like complex gameplay and than introduce a mod of the mod that removes a huge part of the complexity, you divide the player base. And look at the graph, with such low numbers a divide can kill the game. I remember, that I found less and less classic servers leading finally to the point I quit playing the game myself.
I don't want to say that Combat killed NS1. But the divide it caused in a small player base (together with other factors you have named) may have done that.
And on a side note, I personally don't like Combat. There are better games out there that create that sort of shallow gameplay better. I like NS2 because of the complexity. Combat doesn't really has that. This makes it hard to believe for me, that Combat in NS1 really dragged new players in.
And on a side note, I personally don't like Combat. There are better games out there that create that sort of shallow gameplay better. I like NS2 because of the complexity. Combat doesn't really has that. This makes it hard to believe for me, that Combat in NS1 really dragged new players in.
I played combat 95% of the time in NS1 and would have stopped playing years earlier if combat wasn't there. With the catchup XP mod you didn't have to worry about latejoin and could just pick up and play.
187combat and Le Bordel were always full, Le bordel died less than 18 months ago - you could still play with a full server at the weekend, CO retained a good size player base. CO gets way too much hate.
@Ricez:
I have no problem with the fact, that you like the Combat Mod.
I just question that it has introduced new players to NS1.
I believe you, that you may have stopped playing NS1 sooner without the Combat mod.
But while you kept happily playing Combat, you weren't playing on the classic server.
With already low player numbers, this made it nearly impossible for me to find a classic game with enough players to be fun.
So I quit.
And many others did.
I can only attest to my reasons for leaving NS1. For me it was combat even if it was only due to observation. I observed full combat servers and empty classic servers. It was hard to find a good classic game or get people to join classic. Looking back perhaps it was because the most of the classic players left? I don't know. I think it was the 3.2 or 3.4 patch (I don't remember) that made some balance changes that really changed the game IMO. Again my memory fails, but I think it had to do with some wicked fades being OP.
I think Combat just came at the time of classic decline and that makes it easy to try and say it was combats fault. I think it was a combination of things patch changes, steam issues, the fact that it wasn't being ported to Source, combat pulling a few classic players away but making it look like it was pulling a lot classic players away (again observation and how it made me feel).
Though I don't recall Steam being an issue for me so perhaps I left before then. With WoW launching and not being able to find good classic matches I left for the time/life sinkhole that is WoW.
Thankfully NS2 launched at the perfect time with the decline of WoW and great classic style games I am back and happy!
maybe @|DFA|Havoc can remind me of the balance change that ruined the game for us
I would say that it wasn't a single balance change that killed our NS1 community so much as the gradual accumulation of many small changes. We had a pretty noticeable decline in our community activity starting when 2.0 released and overhauled much of the game balance and feel. It wasn't because of Steam, as horrid as it was back then - it took several years to get the friends list working properly. We all hated it, but we all downloaded and used it regardless, that wasn't what stopped us from playing. I remember idling in the server for hours at times just to seed. I don't know how it was for the larger community, but 2.0 was not very popular in our group.
There was some resurgence with later patches, and in particular 3.0 and Combat brought in a lot of new players. The problem was that many of the new players coming in were only interested in the more shallow and less team-oriented gameplay of CO, and I guess some of the longtime players found they preferred it too. This caused something of a snowball effect, at least in our community and from my own observations: CO servers always had people playing in them, they were easy to jump into without any significant investment, and so even players who might prefer Classic would still gravitate to the servers that had people playing rather than spend who knows how long trying to seed a Classic server. It was the path of least resistance, and playing CO was usually preferable to not playing at all. It's in this way that it divided the community, and that's why people like myself who don't dislike the Combat mod itself still resent it. For a lot of the playerbase it wasn't 'better', it was just 'easier', so that's what we ended up playing instead of Classic.
In general, I would say that it felt like the game was gradually developed into a bland mush in order to appeal to a larger audience. Forcing the games to be shorter, often determined within a few minutes and with fewer legitimate decision trees to follow, and adding things like CO or tweaking mechanics like jetpackers being immune to stomp and taking no falling damage, all these things that made the game more accessible and easier to grasp, but I feel like just... chipped away at its soul. So yeah, CO might have kept people playing NS1 longer than they might have otherwise, but it wasn't the same NS1 as the one I fell in love with.
My biggest personal pet peeve, probably the biggest thing that ruined NS1 for me, was ridiculously overpowered superman / godmode profades completely breaking casual pub games. It's worth noting that this still happens in NS2. By the time late 2004 rolled around, our community had already dwindled significantly and many of those left were burned out. It was almost impossible to find or start a Classic game, and they just weren't as enjoyable as they used to be. At that point, it was all too easy for a large majority of the clan to break off to go play WoW instead. I don't even like MMOs, and I still got sucked in.
I pre-ordered NS2 mainly just as a thank you to UWE for all the countless hours of NS1 that I'd played, and didn't expect to actually like it or play it after seeing the direction that NS1 had ended up going in. I didn't really play at all during the alpha or beta, not least because of stability and performance issues, and I completely tuned out of any news relating to the development. It wasn't until PAX Prime 2012 when I ran into this super friendly Australian guy at the NS2 booth and saw some near-release gameplay that I started to get excited and just a little bit hopeful again.
Now here I am 520 hours in and I still play almost every night. As much as it frustrates the living hell out of me sometimes, as much as I think it still needs work and polish and refinement, I absolutely love it. There's nothing else in the world like it.
in Italy NS3.0 was killed by Call Of Duty, ok names.. the best were Georgethegorge, Sgarrone, Jumbalaya ( Italy Nation Cup NS squad ) and others noobs from minor clans.
Aside from free weekends, what is the best way to bolster players counts? And keep them?
Can't be done. I work in the industry and that is the holy grail. Being able to keep player counts up, keeping sales up, over an extended long term? Everything will decline, it's just a matter of how fast. Even WoW is in decline now, despite people who suggested that would never happen. They're about as close to the 'holy grail' as you can get, and I don't have to tell you how much money is behind that enterprise.
The biggest problem for UWE isn't keeping player counts up. Player counts don't pay the bills. Selling copies pays the bills. So the question becomes how do you keep *sales* up. (Since if you can do that, the player counts will come with it.) That too, there is no easy answer. Even TF2, which struggled with sagging sales, eventually went free-to-play as a means to keep the cash coming in. (Frankly they did an outstanding job with the conversion to free-to-play, they're raking in money hand over fist.)
For NS2 this won't be as easy. The game is a niche market to begin with. Then you have a game that is hard to learn, is geared for competitive players, and has no trainer. It most certainly does handicap the UWE team.
Right now I think they should be looking at a content DLC with alien/marine/weapon skins. We've seen how many people have begged to get their hands on the black armor, despite not even being able to SEE it on their character. People will pay for eye-candy. TF2 is a perfect example of that. Lock down the game so that skins can't be changed with mods, (to prevent the cheating and abuse we currently have) and then offer new skins up for sale. If Steam won't allow this kind of DLC, then create a new store page with a 'new' NS2 game that includes the new skins. Then offer an upgrade price for those who want to 'upgrade' from the existing version. There has to be a way to do it. Steam is in the business of making money, they won't tie the hands of a large developer that wants to do so.
I know UWE will disagree (and I respect that) but I honestly think that they should get together with people who create entire new game modes like combat and hammer out a profit-sharing deal to turn it into a DLC. I'm not saying people should pay for maps or mods, but for something so extensive (like Combat), ask people for $5 for the new content. I know of very few who wouldn't pay on principle when they know they are supporting the continued development of the game.
As much as it is laudable to say you want to deliver everything and anything added to the game for free, the reality is that this won't sell extra copies. Once you saturate the user base the sales will dry up no matter how much new material you put into it. (unless you drop the price to a really low and ridiculous level - even then there will be limits.)
So while Charlie and I disagree on some of these points, I still think they should be looking much further ahead.
If my memory serves me correctly, many servers had combat AND classic - when the population went too low, or when people voted for combat maps, the server switched to combat mode.
I hated that - I wanted to play classic. I think by that point I'd stopped running my server (I wouldn't have had combat on it for sure!), a lot of my friends went to play WoW (which I had no interest in), devour didn't help, and did BF2 come out around then, too? At some point I went off to play Neverwinter Nights, bizarrely, and ended up writing a persistent/database-driven world for that with some friends.
A whole bunch of reasons conspired to make me stop playing NS1, but those which *were* under the control of the mod team and community were devour and combat.
I like the way we have it now with combat servers separated from ns2 game mode servers. I actually enjoy combat now as a way to unwind or warm up before classic. As long as we don't go back to a "everyone vote for co_faceoff!" call on normal NS2 servers, I'll be happy. Co has its place, but it's a mod, and should be separated as such IMHO!
@fanatic: when stating that NS2 has a high proportion of competitive players amongst those who make up the daily playercount, I wasn't trying to compare it to NS1, but rather other games in general. I think there are something like >600 comp players of NS2, and 1800 daily players. Assuming comp players play most days (which isn't completely unreasonable), this means that maybe 10-30% of concurrent players are in ENSL-registered clans. I stand to be corrected (and acknowledge these are broad brushstroke figures), but that seems like a fairly high proportion to me!
I would be interested to know what the proportion of competitive players was in NS1 throughout its lifetime (I suspect it was much higher than NS2, especially later in its life). Either way, comp NS2 seems to be gaining some popularity, which can only be a good thing!
NS2 has about 1250 peak concurrent every day, which probably means about 10K daily
also it seems to follow similar patterns to other multiplayer games...
and in most multiplayer games, mods do divide the community. if the mod itself doesn't bring in new players, then it does shrink the player base of the unmodified game. this has happened in a ton of FPS/RTS games (treating the genres separately...)
When "easy mode" removes key elements of the gameplay, it does not work as a substitute for a learning curve.
Just paying for the game tricks people into learning how to play it. But if they are given reasons not to learn it ("here, go play easy mode instead"), then they will simply choose never to do so
I wouldn't be surprised if ended up like Quake where easy mode (Clan Arena) killed off the "real mode"
If my memory serves me correctly, many servers had combat AND classic - when the population went too low, or when people voted for combat maps, the server switched to combat mode.
You have it mostly right. In NS1 the combat mode was originally developed as a means to FILL a server. Since playing 2v2 or 3v3 on those huge NS1 maps was painful, this was an alternative that was more 'fun'. The idea was that when the server reached a minimum level of 6v6, when the round ended the next map would be a classic map. (then if playercount dropped it would go back to combat next rotation)
The problem was that there were a lot of people who loved combat more than classic.
Comments
Considering that NS1 was a free mod for a game released in the 90s, that remained popular for almost 10 years and left a permanent impression on everyone who played it for any significant period of time, you (the devs) have every reason to be proud of your work. Unless alzheimers gets me, I'm going to remember that game until the day I die.
Clinging on to them is so much easier, though...
Combat did impact classic, there is no question about that. WoW was also a factor. Lots of our clan members started playing WoW and it showed in decreasing numbers on servers.
Playa_2b
I think Combat just came at the time of classic decline and that makes it easy to try and say it was combats fault. I think it was a combination of things patch changes, steam issues, the fact that it wasn't being ported to Source, combat pulling a few classic players away but making it look like it was pulling a lot classic players away (again observation and how it made me feel).
Though I don't recall Steam being an issue for me so perhaps I left before then. With WoW launching and not being able to find good classic matches I left for the time/life sinkhole that is WoW.
Thankfully NS2 launched at the perfect time with the decline of WoW and great classic style games I am back and happy!
maybe @|DFA|Havoc can remind me of the balance change that ruined the game for us
Let's not forget all the siege map servers. Personally, I found them more fun than combat, but they were detrimental to Classic games as well.
The Icelandic NS1 community was at its peak just before wow was released. We had over 150 active players and 3 servers full every day, it was constantly growing. After wow was released it was impossible to get it active again. To many players went to wow and to other games afterwards.
I'll also take a look at what was going on with the values post 2008. I suspect it might be an issue with me using two different sources for the playercount values. Specifically,
2004-2006 = Old Steam Stats caches (e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20061107105032/http://www.steampowered.com/status/game_stats.html)
2004-2009 = Gamespy Top Mods for HL1 caches (http://web.archive.org/web/20081221164130/http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/mods.asp?id=15&s=1)
Unfortunately, it looks like steam stats switched over to their current format around that time and didn't include NS1 in their playercount tracking. I'll see if I can find an alternate source (game monitor or game tracker) with cached playercount values to fill in the blanks.
Seems pretty variable tho, probably heavily depends on when it was cached in terms of peak/min playercounts
I think http://unknownworlds.com/ns/ can go back through all the news articles still
Website outtage was Aug 2k5 to Sept 2k6 IIRC? I may be waaay off on this tho... god its been forever.
WOW Release was late 2k4, which is shortly before the graph really drops.
It is worth noting that it's amazing NS did as well as it did through all the changes/releases around then, which killed off many other games/mods. It is truly a testiment to how good the gameplay was.
Not to mention that HL2 came out around the same time and all the talk was about which mods were going to work on porting over to Source (discussed: all of them; implemented: almost none of them).
After steam mods could be a real shite to install, that put people off. Wow took players from all games - i bet CS took a hit too.
Combat haters always blamed combat for killing ns when it clearly didnt. Craply run classic servers with crap admins killed classic. Combat games (and aeige to aome extent) were playable to most people. Classic could be dominated by a single fade with blink/meta/swipe skills.
Problem in ns1 is the same as ns2. All balanxing is for nought if newbies join a classic game, getsteamrollered due to lack of team balance or crap admins. They then join a combat where they can play and enjoy.
(on mobile cant be arsed correcting spelling)
There was no central community anymore at this time, only a few clan based.
Lacking of exchange and new blood can only lead to extinction.
I think the main causes for the decline were
- Steam sucking in the early days
- The website going down for a long period of time
- World of Warcraft (so many game communities crushed in the wake of this behemoth)
- Natural decline in interest over time
I do enjoy NS1 a whole lot though, wish people still played it. I can get on a 32-man WongaNS server that fills up every day, but other than that and the occasional passworded gather server the game is dead. Maybe this forum could organize some NS1 gathers? I could see there being interest in that.
I question that. If you have a mod, that only caters to a small audience of people who like complex gameplay and than introduce a mod of the mod that removes a huge part of the complexity, you divide the player base. And look at the graph, with such low numbers a divide can kill the game. I remember, that I found less and less classic servers leading finally to the point I quit playing the game myself.
I don't want to say that Combat killed NS1. But the divide it caused in a small player base (together with other factors you have named) may have done that.
And on a side note, I personally don't like Combat. There are better games out there that create that sort of shallow gameplay better. I like NS2 because of the complexity. Combat doesn't really has that. This makes it hard to believe for me, that Combat in NS1 really dragged new players in.
I played combat 95% of the time in NS1 and would have stopped playing years earlier if combat wasn't there. With the catchup XP mod you didn't have to worry about latejoin and could just pick up and play.
187combat and Le Bordel were always full, Le bordel died less than 18 months ago - you could still play with a full server at the weekend, CO retained a good size player base. CO gets way too much hate.
I have no problem with the fact, that you like the Combat Mod.
I just question that it has introduced new players to NS1.
I believe you, that you may have stopped playing NS1 sooner without the Combat mod.
But while you kept happily playing Combat, you weren't playing on the classic server.
With already low player numbers, this made it nearly impossible for me to find a classic game with enough players to be fun.
So I quit.
And many others did.
I would say that it wasn't a single balance change that killed our NS1 community so much as the gradual accumulation of many small changes. We had a pretty noticeable decline in our community activity starting when 2.0 released and overhauled much of the game balance and feel. It wasn't because of Steam, as horrid as it was back then - it took several years to get the friends list working properly. We all hated it, but we all downloaded and used it regardless, that wasn't what stopped us from playing. I remember idling in the server for hours at times just to seed. I don't know how it was for the larger community, but 2.0 was not very popular in our group.
There was some resurgence with later patches, and in particular 3.0 and Combat brought in a lot of new players. The problem was that many of the new players coming in were only interested in the more shallow and less team-oriented gameplay of CO, and I guess some of the longtime players found they preferred it too. This caused something of a snowball effect, at least in our community and from my own observations: CO servers always had people playing in them, they were easy to jump into without any significant investment, and so even players who might prefer Classic would still gravitate to the servers that had people playing rather than spend who knows how long trying to seed a Classic server. It was the path of least resistance, and playing CO was usually preferable to not playing at all. It's in this way that it divided the community, and that's why people like myself who don't dislike the Combat mod itself still resent it. For a lot of the playerbase it wasn't 'better', it was just 'easier', so that's what we ended up playing instead of Classic.
In general, I would say that it felt like the game was gradually developed into a bland mush in order to appeal to a larger audience. Forcing the games to be shorter, often determined within a few minutes and with fewer legitimate decision trees to follow, and adding things like CO or tweaking mechanics like jetpackers being immune to stomp and taking no falling damage, all these things that made the game more accessible and easier to grasp, but I feel like just... chipped away at its soul. So yeah, CO might have kept people playing NS1 longer than they might have otherwise, but it wasn't the same NS1 as the one I fell in love with.
My biggest personal pet peeve, probably the biggest thing that ruined NS1 for me, was ridiculously overpowered superman / godmode profades completely breaking casual pub games. It's worth noting that this still happens in NS2. By the time late 2004 rolled around, our community had already dwindled significantly and many of those left were burned out. It was almost impossible to find or start a Classic game, and they just weren't as enjoyable as they used to be. At that point, it was all too easy for a large majority of the clan to break off to go play WoW instead. I don't even like MMOs, and I still got sucked in.
I pre-ordered NS2 mainly just as a thank you to UWE for all the countless hours of NS1 that I'd played, and didn't expect to actually like it or play it after seeing the direction that NS1 had ended up going in. I didn't really play at all during the alpha or beta, not least because of stability and performance issues, and I completely tuned out of any news relating to the development. It wasn't until PAX Prime 2012 when I ran into this super friendly Australian guy at the NS2 booth and saw some near-release gameplay that I started to get excited and just a little bit hopeful again.
Now here I am 520 hours in and I still play almost every night. As much as it frustrates the living hell out of me sometimes, as much as I think it still needs work and polish and refinement, I absolutely love it. There's nothing else in the world like it.
after the cup the NS scene in Italy was officially dead.
http://clanbase.ggl.com/claninfo.php?cid=380792
The biggest problem for UWE isn't keeping player counts up. Player counts don't pay the bills. Selling copies pays the bills. So the question becomes how do you keep *sales* up. (Since if you can do that, the player counts will come with it.) That too, there is no easy answer. Even TF2, which struggled with sagging sales, eventually went free-to-play as a means to keep the cash coming in. (Frankly they did an outstanding job with the conversion to free-to-play, they're raking in money hand over fist.)
For NS2 this won't be as easy. The game is a niche market to begin with. Then you have a game that is hard to learn, is geared for competitive players, and has no trainer. It most certainly does handicap the UWE team.
Right now I think they should be looking at a content DLC with alien/marine/weapon skins. We've seen how many people have begged to get their hands on the black armor, despite not even being able to SEE it on their character. People will pay for eye-candy. TF2 is a perfect example of that. Lock down the game so that skins can't be changed with mods, (to prevent the cheating and abuse we currently have) and then offer new skins up for sale. If Steam won't allow this kind of DLC, then create a new store page with a 'new' NS2 game that includes the new skins. Then offer an upgrade price for those who want to 'upgrade' from the existing version. There has to be a way to do it. Steam is in the business of making money, they won't tie the hands of a large developer that wants to do so.
I know UWE will disagree (and I respect that) but I honestly think that they should get together with people who create entire new game modes like combat and hammer out a profit-sharing deal to turn it into a DLC. I'm not saying people should pay for maps or mods, but for something so extensive (like Combat), ask people for $5 for the new content. I know of very few who wouldn't pay on principle when they know they are supporting the continued development of the game.
As much as it is laudable to say you want to deliver everything and anything added to the game for free, the reality is that this won't sell extra copies. Once you saturate the user base the sales will dry up no matter how much new material you put into it. (unless you drop the price to a really low and ridiculous level - even then there will be limits.)
So while Charlie and I disagree on some of these points, I still think they should be looking much further ahead.
I hated that - I wanted to play classic. I think by that point I'd stopped running my server (I wouldn't have had combat on it for sure!), a lot of my friends went to play WoW (which I had no interest in), devour didn't help, and did BF2 come out around then, too? At some point I went off to play Neverwinter Nights, bizarrely, and ended up writing a persistent/database-driven world for that with some friends.
A whole bunch of reasons conspired to make me stop playing NS1, but those which *were* under the control of the mod team and community were devour and combat.
I like the way we have it now with combat servers separated from ns2 game mode servers. I actually enjoy combat now as a way to unwind or warm up before classic. As long as we don't go back to a "everyone vote for co_faceoff!" call on normal NS2 servers, I'll be happy. Co has its place, but it's a mod, and should be separated as such IMHO!
@fanatic: when stating that NS2 has a high proportion of competitive players amongst those who make up the daily playercount, I wasn't trying to compare it to NS1, but rather other games in general. I think there are something like >600 comp players of NS2, and 1800 daily players. Assuming comp players play most days (which isn't completely unreasonable), this means that maybe 10-30% of concurrent players are in ENSL-registered clans. I stand to be corrected (and acknowledge these are broad brushstroke figures), but that seems like a fairly high proportion to me!
I would be interested to know what the proportion of competitive players was in NS1 throughout its lifetime (I suspect it was much higher than NS2, especially later in its life). Either way, comp NS2 seems to be gaining some popularity, which can only be a good thing!
Roo
http://steamstatshistory.appspot.com/list
NS2 has about 1250 peak concurrent every day, which probably means about 10K daily
also it seems to follow similar patterns to other multiplayer games...
and in most multiplayer games, mods do divide the community. if the mod itself doesn't bring in new players, then it does shrink the player base of the unmodified game. this has happened in a ton of FPS/RTS games (treating the genres separately...)
When "easy mode" removes key elements of the gameplay, it does not work as a substitute for a learning curve.
Just paying for the game tricks people into learning how to play it. But if they are given reasons not to learn it ("here, go play easy mode instead"), then they will simply choose never to do so
I wouldn't be surprised if ended up like Quake where easy mode (Clan Arena) killed off the "real mode"
Make a game that's actually fun to play, and then keep producing content so it continues to be that way.
The problem was that there were a lot of people who loved combat more than classic.